63
" Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with... "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet
68
" It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough. "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet
69
" And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life. "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet
72
" Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else. "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet
77
" Nodig is toch alleen: eenzaamheid, een grote innerlijke eenzaamheid. Zichzelf aan de tand voelen en urenlang niemand ontmoeten, dat moet men kunnen bereiken. Eenzaam zijn zoals je als kind eenzaam was toen de volwassenen in zaken verwikkeld rondliepen die belangrijk en groot leken, omdat de grote mensen er zo bedrijvig uitzagen en je van hun doen en laten niets begreep. En als je dan op een dag inziet dat hun bezigheden armzalig zijn, hun beroepen verstard en niet meer verbonden met het leven, waarom dan niet er met de ogen van een kind naar blijven kijken als naar iets vreemds, en wel vanuit de diepte van je eigen wereld, vanuit de weidsheid van je eigen eenzaamheid, die zelf werk is, status en beroep?
- Rome, 23 december 1903 "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet
78
" En als wij weer over de eenzaamheid praten, dan wordt steeds duidelijker dat dat in wezen niet iets is wat je kunt uitzoeken of nalaten. Wij zijn eenzaam. Men kan zichzelf zand in de ogen strooien en doen alsof het niet zo is. Dat is alles. Maar hoeveel beter is het niet om in te zien dat wij het wel zijn, en daar gewoon vanuit te gaan. Het zal ons dan wel duizelen; want alle punten waarop ons oog gewoon was te rusten, worden ons afgenomen, niets is meer nabij en al wat ver is is oneindig ver. Wie vanuit zijn kamer, nagenoeg onvoorbereid en onverhoeds, op de top van een hoge berg zou worden neergezet, zou iets soortgelijks moeten voelen: een weergaloze onzekerheid, het overgeleverd zijn aan iets onbekends zou hem bijna te gronde richten.
Borgeby Gård Flädie, Zweden, 12 augustus 2017 "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet